Reading the monthly TEU release

A port's monthly container statistics are its official count of the boxes it moved, published in TEU a few weeks after the month closes. The Port of Los Angeles, for example, posts the prior month's figures around the middle of the following month, so the number always describes a month that has already ended. Reading it well means comparing it three ways and knowing which stream to watch.

The release lags, and that is fine

The lag is built in. A port has to close its books before it can report, so a monthly release is history, not a live gauge. That is why this site treats the volume figures as monthly and dated, and leads its live congestion read with the weekly ship queue instead. When you read a TEU release, read it as a firm record of a finished month, not as a reading of conditions right now.

Three comparisons

One month's total means little on its own, so read it against three baselines. Month over month tells you the short-run direction, though it is noisy because volume is seasonal and a strong month often just reflects peak season. Year over year strips the seasonality out, comparing like month to like month, which is the cleaner read on whether import demand is growing or shrinking. And against the 2019 baseline, the last full pre-pandemic year, tells you where volume sits versus normal, a useful anchor after years of boom and correction. Any single comparison can mislead. The three together rarely do.

Which stream to watch

The headline TEU total blends loaded imports, loaded exports and empties, and for a US importer the loaded-import line is the one that carries the signal. It is the count of full boxes actually landing, the closest thing in the release to a demand reading. Empties are the repositioning tell, and a big swing in them usually says more about where carriers are moving equipment than about trade. When a report leads with a record total, check whether the loaded imports drove it or the empties did.

Worked example: one release, three ways

The chart above carries the Los Angeles monthly streams with their history. Take the latest month and read it three ways off the chart. Against the month before, is volume rising or falling, and is that just the season. Against the same month last year, is import demand up or down on a clean comparison. Against 2019, is the port running above or below its pre-pandemic normal. Do that on the loaded-import line specifically and you have read the release the way it should be read, not off the one big number in the headline.

The Dwell reports each port's monthly TEU as the authority publishes it, dated to the month and labeled by stream. It does not forecast volumes. For the unit itself, see what is a TEU.